Eastern Pulaski School Board Approves Advertisement of 2015 Budget

The Eastern Pulaski School Board gave permission to advertise their first-ever calendar year budget.

The corporation just recently moved to a calendar year budget after having operating on a fiscal year budget for several decades. The decision to move was prompted by a difficulty with using state software to do budgets. Now only one school corporation in the state remains on a fiscal year budget.

Superintendent Dan Foster said measures were previously taken to ensure the corporation had enough funds to operate for the rest of this year.

“We worked with the Department of Local Government Finance back in late Spring and what they had us do was make a request for a six month appropriation. Basically, we took the July 1, 2013 through June 30, 2014 budget and then just cut that in half and requested that for July 1, 2014 to Dec. 31, 2014 to get us through the next six months,” said Foster.

Foster added that it’s difficult to determine a budget through Dec. 31, 2015 when the board doesn’t know what funds will be coming in, especially since the funding follows the student.

“What will the utility rates be next October? What will be insurance rates be in October? What will fuel costs be? We have no idea. Now with two count dates it’s very difficult. Your state grant is adjusted every six months now. If you lose a few students in a few month, your state grant may be cut a few thousand dollars.”

Foster said the enrollment on the first day of school was close to last year’s fall enrollment number and up from the spring Average Daily Membership (ADM) count.